The research is clear: the first few years of life are crucial to a child’s brain development and future language skills. The best way to build strong neurological connections? One-on-one, verbal interactions between the child and an adult caregiver.

But what does that interaction sound like? What’s the best way to talk to a baby who can’t talk back yet?

A Sunday story from reporter Katherine Long describes how a new pilot program is working to give parents in South King County the tools to strengthen early brain development. Called Vroom, the program includes hundreds of suggested activities — from mimicking a baby’s babbling noises to playing peek-a-boo — that parents can try at different ages.

Pilot program gives parents tools to boost babies’ brains: A new program from the Bezos Family Foundation is teaching parents how to help their children’s brain development at a very early age. Called Vroom, the awareness effort emphasizes one-on-one interaction between parent and child, starting in infancy.

If you’re raised in a family with a mom who’s a computer programmer and dad who’s an aerospace engineer, chances are you’ll take the right high school classes and consider pursuing a bright future in a STEM career.

If you come from a different background, the fields of science, technology, engineering and math — collectively known as STEM — might seem uninviting. Upon graduation from high school, you won’t suddenly develop an interest in a STEM career. If you do, you likely won’t be admitted or succeed as a STEM major in college if you have a lack of high school preparation. With the huge shortage of skilled workers in STEM fields, this seems a travesty.

Highline Public Schools’ new Raisbeck Aviation High School serves as a model for how schools can help fill the local skills gap and give hope to students with limited opportunities. The school’s internship program, in particular, enables students to start exploring STEM careers early on in their high-school careers while gaining important real-world experience.

Raisbeck students are surrounded by caring professionals from aerospace careers on a daily basis. A scaffold approach to STEM career exploration begins with the freshman-level Career Choices class, where a constant stream of STEM professionals come to inform and inspire. Students become comfortable networking with professionals, and many doors are opened, such as tours to commercial space flight company Blue Origin or Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company.

Student loan debt contributes to widening wealth gap (AP): Americans are collectively saddled with $1 trillion in student loan debt, making it difficult for many to start saving or investing at a young age. A 2012 Pew study found 40 percent of households led by someone 35 or younger had some form of student loan debt.

ACLU settles lawsuit over schools’ access to online accounts (AP): A Minnesota school district has agreed to pay $70,000 to settle a case involving a student who made disparaging comments about a teacher’s aide on her Facebook page. The student, a sixth grader at the time, was given detention after school officials allegedly accessed her Facebook profile and email accounts without her parents’ permission.

Almost anyone who has applied to college can trot out a horror story about the much-dreaded Scholastic Aptitude Test, better known as the SAT. The four-hour, fill-in-the-bubble test of math and reading skills has spawned innumerable opinion pieces, diatribes and nightmares.

There’s even a book, The Perfect Score Project, by Debbie Stier, a single mom and public relations professional who took the exam seven times (surely an exercise in masochism), trying to achieve a perfect 2400. Stier’s book is filled with tips for improving student scores, most of which boil down to one unsurprising adage: Study more.

Yet anyone who has flipped through an SAT-prep booklet knows there are easy strategies for gaming the test — techniques that can dramatically improve one’s score, as described here, by Education Lab opinion columnist Dennis McDuffie, a high school senior in Richland, Wash.

Likewise, educators across the country insist that the SAT is a poor measure of student aptitude or likely college success — a backlash that gained more credence after a recent SAT-overhaul by the College Board, which is trying to better align it with classroom curricula.

North Seattle College names new president: North Seattle College has selected Warren Brown as its next president, the school announced Wednesday. Brown is executive vice president for instruction and student services at Seattle Central College and has 17 years of experience in the state’s community college system.

Report finds NY schools are most segregated in nation (AP): New York state has the most racially segregated school system the the U.S., according to a report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. Researchers say charter schools in New York City are among the least racially diverse of all.

A year ago this month, the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education publicly acknowledged it was investigating racial disparities in student discipline in Seattle’s public schools.

So is the investigation close to completion?

No clue. The silence from the federal education department remains as thick as it was a year ago.

“About all we can tell you is that the compliance review remains under investigation,” a spokesman said Wednesday.

Seattle Public Schools officials say they don’t know the status of the investigation, either. But they also say they are working to reduce the number of suspensions in their schools.

Federal investigators last visited some Seattle schools late last year, saying they wanted to do more interviews, said Pat Sander, a district administrator. But they have not called to set those interviews up, she said.

As more and more young people set their sights on higher education, high-school guidance counselors continue to serve an important role. For many students, they are the only people available to help walk them through college applications, standardized tests, financial-aid forms and personal essays.

In an upcoming story, Education Lab will examine the growing workload of high-school counselors and how certain programs are working to give students more one-on-one attention. In the meantime, we’re reaching out to current high-school students and recent graduates to get their take on the current role of the guidance counselor:

State funding boosts public-private STEM scholarship program: A $25-million boost from the state Legislature is expected to help the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship program to get contributions from private businesses. The scholarships are available to undergraduate Washington residents who are studying at in-state public or private colleges and whose family income is at or below the 125th percentile.

Spokane prepares to arm school resource officers (The Spokesman-Review): School resource officers in Spokane are being trained as Spokane Police Department reserve officers so they can carry guns on school grounds. The training is part of an extensive security upgrade at Spokane Public Schools that also includes installing more cameras and improving security locks.

Stories in the series

When tackling the topic of student discipline, some of the country’s toughest schools have done a turnaround. Instead of focusing on rules broken, they now ask kids to confront themselves. The result? Fewer suspensions and new perspective on the point of school itself. Read the story →

It stands to reason: Kick troubled students out of school and they often come back even worse. The Kent School District is trying to tackle this national problem by overhauling the way it handles discipline. But its answers spark even more questions. Read the story →

In an idea borrowed from college athletics, the University of Washington boosts promising engineering students — many of them women and minorities — with an extra year of academic work. Read the story →

Boosting the quality of preschool in Seattle could help children, and the city as a whole. A number of studies, including one from the ’60s, establish that potential. But there is no guarantee of success. Read the story →

Universal, free preschool in Tulsa, Okla., has produced results attracting national attention, and could be a blueprint for Seattle. But after 16 years the long-term outcomes raise almost as many questions as they answer. Read the story →

Communication failures both within Seattle Public Schools and with parents of children with disabilities continue to undermine the district’s efforts to fix longstanding problems in special education. Read the story →

A new focus on individualized advice and counseling, boosted by software tools, is helping hundreds more students earn degrees and certificates each year at Walla Walla Community College. Read the story →

The path to college often leaves disadvantaged students behind. Two unusual nonprofits, one based in Seattle, have helped vault thousands of low-income students onto university campuses. Read the story →

In an attempt to add depth to the curriculum in America's most popular advanced high-school courses, some local teachers threw out most of their lectures and replaced them with a series of projects. Results so far are encouraging. Read the story →

Western Washington University college students are working as mentors, tutors and role models for thousands of K-12 students in and around Bellingham. The goal: convince them that college should be part of their educational trajectory. Read the story →

Kent educators combed through transcripts and discovered 2,600 young people in their district without any kind of diploma or credential. Enter iGrad, a program linking dropouts with college, that has been flooded with kids who want a second chance. Read the story →

A community group in northwest Chicago has turned hundreds of hesitant parents into capable classroom helpers, role models and leaders by tapping into strengths many don't realize they have. Read the story →

Missing just a few days of class in sixth grade can predict whether you'll graduate from high school. That research powers a national anti-dropout effort that's making a difference at Seattle's Aki Kurose and Denny International middle schools. Read the story →

For years, students at White Center Heights Elementary logged some of the lowest test scores in King County. Then teachers tried something new, and the numbers soared by double-digits after just one year. So what happened, and could it be replicated elsewhere? Read the story →

About the authors

John Higgins is one of Education Lab's reporters. He was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) from 2012 to 2013.

Katherine Long has been a reporter for The Seattle Times since 1990, focusing for the past three years on higher ed, with stories that have ranged from the complexities of prepaid tuition programs to nontraditional ways to earn a degree.

Claudia Rowe joined The Seattle Times’ reporting staff in 2013. She has written about education for The New York Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, among other publications.

Leah Todd is an education reporter at The Times. She previously covered education for the Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming.

Mike Siegel has been a news photographer at the Seattle Times since 1987. His photography was used in a series titled "Methadone and the Politics of Pain," which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012 for investigative reporting.

Linda Shaw is The Times’ education editor. Previously, she covered public education as a reporter at The Seattle Times for more than two decades. Her coverage has won numerous national and local awards and honors.

Caitlin Moran is community engagement editor for Education Lab. She came to The Times from Patch, where she spent three years managing hyperlocal news websites on the Eastside.

About Solutions Journalism Network

The Education Lab project is being done with the support of the Solutions Journalism Network. SJN is a non-profit organization created to legitimize and spread the practice of solutions journalism: rigorous and compelling reporting about responses to social problems.